Almost exactly a year ago, Belgian-born venture capitalist Fred Destin decided to leave his longtime post with Atlas Venture in Boston for Accel Partners in London. Last week, over a charcuterie board at a French cafe in San Francisco, Destin talked with StrictlyVC about the move, what the Accel team in London shares in common with their U.S. peers (and what they don’t), and the newest trend in European startup funding. Some of that chat, edited for length, follows.

Accel London has been around since 2000 and closed a $475 million fund in 2013. 

Yes, and started investing it in April of last year. The fund was raised with maybe a little bit of anticipation. Also, sometimes you meet no entrepreneurs you want to back, then you meet five at the same time, so our pace is always a little inconsistent.

How big is the team?

We have six partners, one VP, one principal, three associates. We have a habit of promoting from within. I’m a rare external hire.

How closely tied are you to the team here in the U.S.?

We run separate funds, but it’s the same brand and we have a fair amount of overlap [in terms of LPs], and I believe we have 18 coinvestments that come in a variety of flavors. Both funds had been looking at SaaS accounting for small businesses, and in the end, [New Zealand-based] Xero is the only company you want to back in this field – we think it can kill Intuit – so we [collectively] made a $100 million investment in the company. We’ve also co-invested in [the newly public online marketplace] Etsy and [the Australia-based collaboration software company] Atlassian. Sometimes, it’s European-born companies, too. When we backed World Remit, a remittance business, half of its $40 million Series A came from the U.S. and the other half came from London.

What if you wanted more than 50 percent? Do you ever compete with the U.S. team? 

I can’t really think of a case where we’ve  been competitive. They’re a really disciplined team on investments, and so are we. If we find something that we think is really great, we’ll say, hey, we can syndicate with Index [Ventures] or we can try to move all the money through the Accel partnership. [The U.S. firm] looks at [the deals] independently. But there are definite benefits [to partnering], as when we find a little gem like Showroomprive (a Paris-based online shopping giant that sells discounted clothes, cosmetics and household items). It was bootstrapped and had got to quite a large size, and [my London colleague] Harry [Nelis] went to meet them and said, “We can write a single check. I’ll bring Palo Alto into it so you have one investor and one board member.” So we put in [roughly $47 million] in a single shot, with both funds contributing.

Can you see a future where you won’t be Accel London but something else? DFJ and Benchmark obviously decided to reign in their brands at different points.

You learn from what happens in the past. I’m not sure you can scale venture very well. Having general partners in London who effectively decide on what happens to the firm makes decision-making really simple.

We’re also in close cooperation with Palo Alto to make sure we represent the brand in the same way.

How institutionalized are your communications?

The important decisions, like when to hold an annual LP meeting or when to fundraise, are discussed extensively between the groups, but the rest of our discussions are very organic and multithreaded. You don’t want to fight the natural order of things. We’re very careful about not sharing too much information about the companies we look at, but we definitely share expertise and views and kind of help each other be better.

It helps when you have funds that are performing well and teams that are high quality. If one part of the organization was doing well and the other wasn’t, it might become more tense, but that’s not the case.

For more from our sit-down with Destin, including his insights into how hedge funds and Rocket Internet specifically are changing Europe’s startup scene, continue reading here.
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New Fundings

Aegea Medical, an eight-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based medical device company whose water vapor treatment system is designed to treat abnormal uterine bleeding, just raised $36 million in Series C funding from BioMed Ventures, Solas Bioventures, and earlier backers Alloy Ventures, Delphi Ventures, and Covidien/Medtronic. The company has now raised at least $55.4 million in equity and debt, shows Crunchbase.

AltSchool, a 2.5-year-old, San Francisco-based network of new schools with a tech-heavy, personalized learning approach, has raised $75 million in new equity funding and $25 million in venture debt to grow its enrollment and add to the four schools it currently operates. Earlier backers Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund led the new round, reports the WSJ, with participation from Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s donor-advised fund; Emerson Collective; First Round Capital; Learn Capital; the foundation of venture capitalist John Doerr; Harrison Metal; Jonathan Sackler; Omidyar Network; Adrian Aoun; and other individual investors. AltSchool had previously raised $33 million in equity and $11 million in debt from Silicon Valley Bank. StrictlyVC talked in January with founder Max Ventilla about ballooning demand for the school.

Artivest, a 2.5-year-old, New York-based company that pools the assets of individual investors into single purpose vehicles that invest in both private equity and hedge funds, has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by KKR. Other participants in the round include earlier backers Peter Thiel, Nyca Partners, Anthemis Group, and FinTech Collective. KKR, which has close to $100 billion in assets under management, tells TechCrunch that early-stage investments, of which the firm now has a few, will probably never be a “significant portion” of the firm’s balance sheet but that it could reach into the “hundreds of millions of dollars.” Artivest was co-founded by James Waldinger, who previously worked for Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarium Capital Management. (Thiel is known for working with and otherwise continuing to support previous employees.)

BlueLine Grid, a two-year-old, New York-based mobile messaging platform that’s based on verified identity (it connects local, state, and federal agencies with one another), has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from In-Q-Tel.

CareCloud, a six-year-old, Miami, Fla.-based company that sells practice-management and electronic health-record software to physician practices, has raised $15 million from unnamed earlier backers. The company has now collected roughly $96 million from investors altogether, shows Crunchbase. Its known backers include Adams Street Partners, Hercules Technology Growth Capital, Intel Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, and Tenaya Capital.